Cloud computing is one of the hot topics in today’s IT discussions. No large vendor without an announcement on how to offer cloud computing services and platforms. No software product vendor not worrying about how to make his offering cloud computing aware or riding the cloud computing wave. This has in principle nothing to do with Open Source. However there are similarities in perception. Open Source became popular partially because people hoped to save money in software development and solution implementation. With cloud computing again people expect to save money on hosting and service provisioning by leveraging low cost computer power. To be able to offer low cost computer power Open Source of course comes into the game again. Open Source infrastructure just scales more economically than proprietary systems. And of course the nirvana is to host low cost software on low cost computing power. And if the purpose to provide low cost software access  is to attract large audiences and become a next facebook or youtube then you are probably better off planning with Open Source from the beginning otherwise you will not be able to pay the bills when you scale. So, cloud computing has nothing to do with Open Source by nature, but in reality the two things are quite well connected.

P.S. Of course there are Open Source cloud computing components and elements out there, including the ones listed on EOS Directory, such as Globus Nimbus, OpenNebula and  Eucalyptus.

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This entry was posted by Bruno von Rotz on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 4:01 am and is filed under Open Source projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.